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Where Does Malay Come From? Twenty Years of Discussions About Homeland, Migrations and Classifications

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Where Does Malay Come From? Twenty Years of Discussions About Homeland, Migrations and Classifications K. ALEXANDER ADELAAR Where does Malay come from? Twenty years of discussions about homeland, migrations and classifications Introduction The Malay language consists of many dialects. Furthermore, various other languages are closely related to Malay, including Minangkabau, Kerinci, Iban and Kendayan. Together, these dialects and languages form the 'Malayic' linguistic subgroup within the (West) Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family (Adelaar 1992:1). This article* discusses several issues involving the homeland1 and clas- sifications of the Malayic language subgroup and of Malay in particular. Following an overview of proposed theories about the Malay(ic) homeland (section 1), I discuss the Borneo hypothesis and the applicability of Sapir's (1968) model for the location of linguistic homelands (section 2). I treat the difficulties in assessing language divergence and genetic depth in the Malayic subgroup (section 3), and evaluate the claim of a Malay back-migration from Sumatra to Borneo (section 4). I also compare the locations that have been proposed for a Malayic homeland within Borneo (section 5) and give an overview of classifications of Malayic languages with other Austronesian I am grateful to Adrian Clynes (Universiti Brunei Darussalam), Anthony Jukes (University of Melbourne), and two anonymous readers for their careful reading and comments on an earlier draft of this article. They are in no way responsible for any errors in this version. 1 That is the region where speakers of the hypothetical proto-language ancestral to a linguis- tic subgroup must have lived before they dispersed to other regions. In the case of speakers of Malayic isolects, this is the region where speakers of Proto Malayic originally lived. K. Alexander Adelaar is Associate Professor and Reader at the Melbourne Insitute of Asian Languages and Societies (MIALS) and holds a PhD from Leiden University. His main field of academic interest is Austronesian historical and descriptive linguistics, especially regarding the languages of Madagascar, Taiwan and Borneo. He is the author of Proto-Malayic, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 1992, and 'Retrieving Siraya phonology: a new spelling for a dead language', in: E. Zeitoun and P. Jen-kuei Li (eds), Selected papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, pp. 313-54, Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, 1999. Professor Adelaar may be reached at MIALS, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia. <[email protected]> Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI) 160-1 (2004):l-30 © 2004 Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Palembani (Srivijaya) Indian Ocean LOMBOKSUMBAWA~V Map of the most important toponyms and languages referred to in this article Note: Numbers following language names correspond to numbers on the map indicating the approximate location of the languages in question. Numbers on the map run more or less from west to east but are grouped by area. Acehnese 1 Iban 24 Palembang Malay 6 Bacan Malay (eastern Indonesia) 38 Jakarta Malay/Jakartanese 15 Rejang 4 Balinese 35 Javanese 17 Salako 20 Bangka Malay 13 Kelantan Malay 10 Sambas Malay 21 Banjarese Malay 29 Kendayan 23 Sarawak Malay 25 Belitung Malay 14 Kerinci 3 Sasak 36 Bengkulu Malay 5 Kutai Malay 33 Seraway Malay 7 Berau Malay 34 Lampung 8 Sumbawa 37 Brunei Malay 26 Land Dayak 22 Sundanese 16 Cham(ic) (Indo-China) 19 Maanyan (> East Barito) 31 Tioman Malay 12 Duano 11 Madurese 18 Urak Lawoi' 9 Dusun Deyah 32 Minangkabau 2 (South-West Thailand) East Barito 31 Mualang 27 West Barito 30 Embaloh 28. Ngaju (> West Barito) 30 Where does Malay come from? 3 languages (section 6). A large section assesses attempts at internal classifica- tions of the Malayic subgroup made in the last twenty years (section 7), fol- lowed by some concluding remarks (section 8). 1. Overview of theories about the homeland of Malay and of the Malayic subgroup Theories about the homeland of the Malay language are not new. In the late nine- teenth century the philologist and linguist H. Kern wrote an important article in which he used the Worter undSachen'2 method to reconstruct the Austronesian natural environment (on the basis of predominantly animal and plant names) and to determine where they came from. In his view, the early Austronesians originally lived in coastal Indo-China and from there moved south overland prior to sailing into the areas where they presently live. Operating on this assumption, he believed that the Chams and peninsular Malays were the stay- behinds in a migration process towards the east, rather than recent arrivals of a westward migration, as is generally believed nowadays. Kern, who did not distinguish between Malay and Malayic, argued that the Malay homeland was in the Malay peninsula. Malay has a term for 'south' which basically means 'strait' {salat/an). Kern took this as an indication that the earliest Malays had a sea strait to their south, which makes sense from the geographical perspective of the Malay peninsula. He did not believe that the homeland was in Borneo because that would leave unexplained why the early Malays had left this fertile3 and sparsely populated island to establish them- selves on the coasts of more populated lands elsewhere. Their migrations must have been triggered by external pressure. Kern believed that such pressure was present in mainland Southeast Asia, where Vietnamese and Khmers are known to have gained large territories at the expense of the Austronesian-speaking Chams. Although it is sometimes unclear whether Kern is referring to the Austronesian or the Malay homeland, it is implicit in his argument that the Malays and Chams are the last vestiges of an earlier Austronesian homeland. Kern's hypothesis of a homeland in the Malay peninsula was met with some scepticism by historians and philologists who realized that the establish- ment of Malay communities in the Malay peninsula was generally of a more recent date than that of Malay communities in Sumatra. These scholars also came to appreciate the authenticity of the ancient empire of Srivijaya in south- ern Sumatra (Coedes 1948). Although this empire was mentioned in Malay 2 A method combining the comparison of tangible objects and their various labels for prehis- torical reconstruction (Malkiel 1993:x). 3 According to Kern (1889:287). Kern's description of Borneo as 'geenszins onvruchtbaar' ('not at all infertile') does not appear to reflect reality. 4 K. Alexander Adelaar folklore and literature (for example in the Sejarah Melayu or 'Malay Annals'), it was not until the discovery of seventh-century inscriptions in an archaic form of Malay4 that scholars began to consider it to rest on historical fact. Archaeological and linguistic research on Formosan languages (the Austronesian languages of Taiwan) in the last three decades has made it increasingly clear that the Austronesian homeland was either in Taiwan or in neighbouring coastal southern China (Bellwood 1997:106). The Austronesian migrations into western Indonesia must therefore have been from Taiwan south into the Philippines and then westwards, and the Southeast Asian mainland has come to be viewed as a rather late Austronesian settlement far to the west. Blust (1984-85) was the first to propose Borneo5 as the Malay(ic) home- land. Inspired by his hypothesis, Adelaar (1985) argued that the Malays were more likely to have travelled by sea than by land (as believed by Kern): the demographic pattern of the Malay peninsula is a clear indication that this area had been populated by Malays more recently than had Borneo, where speakers of many Malayic isolects6 live rather far inland. Adelaar (1988) challenges Kern's rather weak evidence based on the term sdlat/an 'south', showing that sdlat/an and utara 'north' were at odds with the inter- nal terminological consistency of the Malay cardinal direction system and must have supplanted earlier terms *daya? 'towards the inland; south' and *laut 'towards the sea; north'. Some other terms in this system still testify to their former presence, namely barat-daya 'southwest'; barat-laut 'northwest'; timur-laut 'northeast'). This state of affairs would fit with a position of the ancient Malay kingdom Srivijaya at the mouth of the Musi River in southeast Sumatra (due to siltation the ancient site is nowadays further inland). Adelaar (1985) and Blust (1988) also believe that the presence of Malays along the Borneo coasts was the result of back-migrations. The Bornean homeland hypothesis combined with back-migrations is compatible with both linguistic and extra-linguistic findings including the traditionally held belief among Malays that the cradle of the Malay nation was in the region of Palembang in southern Sumatra (Andaya and Andaya 1994:31-4). At some 4 Teeuw (1959) remains cautious about qualifying Old Malay as a form of Malayic but Adelaar (forthcoming b) gives phonological and morphosyntactic evidence for it. Compare also Mahdi (forthcoming) who considers it a form of Malay. 5 More particularly, southwest Borneo; see section 6. 6 Our present state of knowledge about Malayic dialects and languages often makes it impossible to determine whether the speech of a certain community represents a language in its own right or a dialect vis-a-vis other varieties of Malayic that are identified as separate lan- guages. In these cases, the cover term 'isolect' is often used, which is 'connotationally neutral in regard to language-dialect identification' (Hudson 1967:12). The term is also used when referring simultaneously to dialects as well as to languages, hence 'Malayic isolects' instead of the more cumbersome 'Malayic dialects and languages'. Where does Malay come from? 5 prehistorical stage, Malayic speakers must have left Borneo and settled in southern Sumatra, where they founded a maritime empire and developed a separate Malay identity (probably under Indian influence, which also brought the idea of statehood to Southeast Asia).
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